Yoga musings...

Satya (truthfulness) – Creating Emotional Boundaries​Much like water, life travels in phases through age, stage and situation. In life, there is always space for personal reflection and on the subject of Satya, or truthfulness, I find the process of reflection an incredibly valuable tool. I also notice that reflections look different depending on the phase of life or what emotional thread has been triggered. Regardless of age, I believe there are always opportunities to learn and create new patterns in the brain and through this we can enhance our interactions and enrich our lives.Bringing awareness to gratitude practice and self-reflection is something that can be fine-tuned as a strong tool for living an honest, authentic and meaningful life. Life with Satya is a life full of depth, connection and adventure on all levels.

Self-reflection holds the potential of creating personal boundaries. Delving more into the meaning of Satya I am able to see how creating personal boundaries is a representation of my personal truth. Most of the time truth isn’t that pretty – it usually shows up at inconvenient times and demands seemingly inappropriate things from a person. The process of uncovering what this looks like for me is a life-long journey. The biggest issue is experiencing the discomfort of sitting in my truth long enough to actually keep those boundaries alive and active.

It can seem easy enough, at least from from the outside, to decide the things in life that you like and don’t like, easy enough to know what is good for you – yet the closer I look, the more I see how this is not necessarily the case. When a situation of a challenging nature is presented, what are the steps that need to be taken to uncover where the truth is? How many layers of non-truth, half-truth, or emotion are uncovered during this process that aren’t actually yours? The layers of conditioning, assumptions and expectations that have been energetically digested throughout life have to be carefully considered and potentially even honestly worked through when in the face of these challenging situations. This work can allow the unveiling and uncovering of what is rightfully your truth, your boundary and where you stand, with integrity.

The biggest conundrum is that truth is always perception… whether held by one person for five minutes or a whole nation for a hundred years. How can we ever collectively distinguish what is ‘universal’ truth? What is a fact? I mean the earth is flat, right? Therefore truth is yours, sacred to you and only you.So working with your own truth and personal boundaries is a way we can support a greater experience of wholeness and integrity.The first challenge of Satya has already been presented above – how can someone create strong personal boundaries if they are yet to see what their boundaries are to begin with? Not knowing the reality of personal limits or energetic comfort zones can be a dangerous place. Emotional well-being is behind the scenes, controlling everything that will soon manifest into the mental and physical realms. Without creating emotional boundaries we are open vessels to whatever and whoever whats to come in and start destroying behind closed doors. (I say emotional as it is usually simple to decipher our physical boundaries.)

Through a lack of self-awareness ‘mistakes’ start to happen, leading to unideal situations or even the inability to cope with all the joy coming our way. How can this be? What is missing here or maybe what is masking the truth?

Being in the physical body, in the mind, reality looks more like a treasure of collected ideas, expectations and overall crap that isn’t solely from one individuals being. (I do believe it would be impossible to go through life and not collect these ideas, expectations and crap, the point here is understanding and self-awareness on how to reflect and let go.)​These ‘mistakes’ are made from a lack of emotional boundaries. Personally I am a naturally open person, I love sharing and having close relationships with people, I always have. A confusing process for me in my own self-reflection was trying to understand if I have to completely close down to create these personal boundaries and survive my own life. There has been moments where it feels like I need a complete personality transplant to keep going (and I am sure I’m not the only one to feel this). Something has changed though; I am still a very open and positive person who shares with people and enjoys close connections although there is a strong (somewhat fiery) line inside of me. When the line is crossed and my truth is compromised to a degree that puts my physical, mental or emotional well-being on the line, I am out of there. Coming back to Ahimsa (Non-Violence), I try to do this with the utmost respect and kindness to whoever is involved in the situation.